https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...
But sure lazy students don’t read the syllabus
But where exactly was the text and how did the students miss it? These articles say it was "in the syllabus" but don't really go much further. I don't have access to the full syllabus but a snippet showing its immediate surroundings is available:
...
objectives. As a result, skill-based
courses in music may be exempt
from Covid-related accomodations
as a progression in skills must be
obtained across the semester to be
successfull in these course. Thus
(free to the first who claims; locker
one hundred forty-seven;
combination fifteen, twenty-five,
thirty-five), students may be
ineligible to make up classes and
coursework beyond the specified
number of days as determined by
the instructor. Requests will be
decided on a case-by-case basis with
specific emphasis on the ability to
achieve learning outcomes.
Technology Support: If you have
problems with your UTC email
...
During a first year university computer science course, students were told to line up and sign an agreement for access to department computer labs. Most of the students lined up, grabbed the paperwork when they reached the front of the queue, then promptly signed it. I decided to actually read the paperwork, which earned me the privilege of standing at the side until the task was complete. No sneaky clauses, for the better or the worse, in my humble opinion. I simply had the privilege of standing out.
Not that it really mattered. I walked away learning a different lesson since I already had access to their computer systems. I already asked for permission to access their systems, and was granted permission without doing the paperwork. For the most part, these agreements are intended to handle the typical case, and are meant to inform rather than be a rigid contract. (The irony: I consider trust as sacrosanct, so I often over comply with the rules.)
Reciprocate when they want to read the changes you made, if their heads don't explode first.
Which is sad, because it's not rocket science.
PS: You should have yelled back "We have an illiterate guide here!" Anyone berating reasonable behavior deserves to be called out as an asshole.
In general the likelihood that the parties have read the contract doesn't have any bearing on the enforceability of it. But most such contracts are also contracts of adhesion (roughly speaking a take-it-or-leave-it offer), and there are special rules for the enforceability of contracts of adhesion. The principle is that they can't be too surprising or too unfair. There's a fair amount of case law about where that line is (which I mostly don't know).
Legally what's important is that you had the opportunity to read the contract before you agreed to it. In HN terms, as an example, you can't legally steal GPL'd code if you don't bother to cat LICENSE.md
Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.
I went into my thesis with a preprint of a paper exposing a fraud in my thesis chair's lab, literally in my back pocket... As a confidence booster.
If it wasn’t the original hard copy but a copy then I don’t think the $20 bill would be there regardless.
You are correct that getting dissertations from far off universities is often impossible. Many universities do not loan their dissertations via interlibrary loan, so unless it is online or you are willing to travel to their campus, you can't get access to it. ProQuest is another option, but they do not have everything and it costs money.
I've heard the 20 dollar bill story many times but I have never found anything like that in an original hard-copy dissertation. If I recall correctly, I have found things used as bookmarks, like receipts or scraps of paper, and the cards in the back cover are often stamped at least once a decade. That seems to suggest that other people have read them over the years, just not as often as other materials.
An amusing counter example - I was asked to proof a students assignment. I did and the essay seemed weird and I couldn’t work out why, but the content was ok.
Some hours later I realised the work was mine, and had been placed in the library as an example of something (presumably anonymised). Good times.
They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”
But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”
The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”
About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.
Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.
Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet.
Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”
This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".
It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.
If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier.
You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.
Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.
This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish.
It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions.
Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.
(Yes, that guy did produce the bottle as promised, from his words.)
They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”
But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”
The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”
About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny.